On the last full down of operation I
noticed it was low tide down at the HF9V crime scene and so I salvaged the
antenna and put it in a body bag and threw away the coaxial cable and radials.
I jumped on 15m in the morning to try and get some JA’s in the log and at 0130
UTC after a few CQ calls I worked K0ZRK who said he’d spot me on the DX
cluster. This resulted in a nice little 2 hour slow rate run on 15m but I still
struggled to work JA’ and in this little cameo period I ended up having more
contacts into USA than JA.
Even after 7 days of being at the same
place at the same time on 20m the long path European QSO’s continued to role in
with lots of QRP, mobile and Scandinavians making their way into the log today and
by now I didn’t have worry about getting Europe to stand by for North America.
The west coast guys were getting through on their own and a handful of
Brazilian, Namibian and South African QSO’s today was a good indication that
everyone who could be heard was getting a new IOTA. I decided to leave 20m even
earlier than the previous day and venture to 15m at 0650 UTC to give me a solid
hour and a half of daylight before sunset to work JA. I was delighted to hear
from Shu JN6RZM and I was bracing myself finally for a JA run at the end of the
DXpedition. But no it didn’t happen. Instead there was a pile up of 15m
Europeans who were working me via the long-path. You know things are weird when
I’m trying to pick out JA call signs over Europeans and then a long path
Mexican XE1AJ is S9+ and breaks the pile up. You also know the 15m band is
weird when another V51 station breaks a JA pile up on 15m. Eventually some JA’s did get in the log until
0900 UTC when 15m closed.
I was hoping I could finish the
DXpedition with a final run into North America on 20m. For the third night in a
row at 1030 UTC there wasn’t a single station audible on 20m and if this had
happened at home I’d simply switch off the radio and watch TV. So again with
blind faith I started calling CQ and again the stations from the east coast of
Canada and USA started coming in. The amazing thing is that unlike the first evening,
for nights 2 to 7 there were no Asian or European signals present. The pile ups
into North America were generally small and I was starting to think that my
signal wasn’t very good and that only big guns could work me and that’s why
there were small pile ups. But that theory went out the window as this evening
and last night there were lots of generals with 100 watts, a number of stations
very excited about working their first ever VK, lots of people driving on the
way to work mobile and guys who I’d worked in previous nights calling me as QRP
this time. Despite a little disappointment with the small pile ups into North
America I was delighted to work 1000 stations and have 21% of the total log to
this part of the world. For example on Bremer Island last year out of 5149
QSO’s there were 371 QSO’s (7% of the total) for North America compared to 3020
QSO’s (62% of the total) for Europe. But with this trip there is 4893 QSO’s
with 1008 QSO’s (21% of the total) for North America compared to 3082 QSO’s
(60% of the total) – so that’s a much better share.
Here’s the final statistics:
4893 Total
QSO’s
3020 - 62% - Europe
1008 - 21% - North America
484 - 10% - Asia
312 - 6% - Oceania
52 -
1% - Africa
16 - <1% - South America
1 - <1% - Antarctica
4295 - 88% - 20M
530 - 11% - 15M
40 - <1% - 40M
28 - <1% - 30M
4828 - 99% - SSB
65 - 1% - PSK31
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